NancyJohnson

The Quiet Life deluxe from Japan. Honestly couldn't be assed in paying £50 for a box set, it's dropped onto digital formats today. I'm a member of a couple of Japan Facebook groups, it's been amazing reading the comments there about this release. End of the day, I've got everything that's on it in one shape or form, even the bootleg of the 1980 audience recording that forms the second (albeit different) 'Live At Budokan' release from the band in the last six months, and folks, it is a bootleg recording and the quality is quite dreadful, but hey, if cassette recordings from nearly 40 years ago (oh, imagine the quality), where the surrounding screams of the female teen-Japanese audience is more prominent in the mix than the music ('Mickeeeeeeey', 'David-saaaaaaan') is your thing, then knock yourself out.

I'm starting out the day with Phil X & The Drills. After that's done, I'm going to migrate to the Futureman Records XTC tribute, 'Garden Of Earthly Delights'.

Last night I fleetingly skipped through one of Ben Crowe's Crimson build videos on the tube of you. He made an off the cuff remark (along with a wry look on his face), that if you could tell the difference between two or three different woods you had a better ear than he does.

Living Colour today.

I am aghast at the prices companies suggest for what are essentially Jazz and Precision (and to a lesser extent, Thunderbirds) copies. Much as I love my Lulls, why anyone would pay £3K for a Precision or Jazz copy is beyond me. As for the OP, why would anyone pay a vintage price for a brand new distressed instrument? Mental.

UFO - Strangers In The Night. Any version. You can close this thread now.

Blimus. Unlistenable.

Hey Ian, I'll try and find them. Hope all is well.

We only switched to Lizard Sweets for this project as we caught some johnny-foreigner passing himself off as us online. There wasn't a Lizard Sweets anwhere (apart from the gummy variety).

I had some isolated bass tracks by John Deacon, one of which was Liar. If you're familiar with the track, you'll know there's a solo bass thing going on in the last quarter; while the bass sits nicely in the mix, isolated it's quite shocking how (for a fretted instrument) far off the notes are. So it brings us to a similar route many of my posts seem to come around to recently, in that does <the subject matter> really matter. With the odd tweak, all my kit is set up to work per my requirements; action, intonation, relief etc. but this is probably me just needing to know that when I play a note it's going to be the note that I expect, not the sharp or flat of it. Given the isolated recording I mentioned earlier, I'd never noticed that the bass was so off and I'd listened to Liar dozens, perhaps hundreds of times over the years. Perhaps our brains are just wired not to notice nuances like this, or more to the point, 100% spot on intonation probably doesn't matter. Just moving along, my band (Lizard Sweets, look 'em up) will be moving into uncharted waters for the next batch of songs. Guitarist/producer is experimenting with quarter tone stuff (which sounds distinctly middle-eastern); god knows how that's going to work.

Yup. Lovely piece of paper stuck to a nondescript lump of something.

Nice try. Best of five?

OK, quiz time. What wood is this:

What scale length is it? The 32" or 34"? It looks sweet, I have to say.

This doesn't compute. I see a mash up of a skinny Bongo, Gibson Ripper and a Spector headstock Strangely alluring.

Explains a lot of things. Oh, tee hee!

I suppose there's wood in there somewhere, probably cedar.

My point (many times over) is that in general we (viz. bassists) are neither carpenters nor arborists (although I do accept that there will be bassists who are carpenters and arborists) and in general the bulk of us here, who have this desire for 'tonewoods' maple, rosewood, mahogany probably wouldn't recognise maple, rosewood, mahongany from hickory, cherry or walnut. Over many moons, we are just fed this nonsense (there, I've said it again) that we need basses built from these 'tonewoods' because we are somehow of the belief that it's both better and it's going to transform our tone from rubber bands over a cardboard box to the rich tone of a grand piano. It's not. How many times have you watched a video of someone on Premier Guitar and see them turn to the camera and say, 'I'm not sure what this body is made from, it could be <insert wood type here>.' You can built from anything and if you did a blind test, I doubt you'd be able to say with any certaintly that what you were playing was built from a laminate of maple, walnut and alder or pencils and resin.

Tonewood. Just this work gets my heckles up. I'll again (try) be the voice of reason. Tone is subjective; it's the end result of many factors; pickups, amps, your hands, technique age of strings etc. etc. Plys, blockwork, laminates. It makes little or no difference. Basswood, Koa, Mahogany, Korina, maple, various spalts and burls etc. Little or no difference (almost probably the latter). I'd bet that most people here wouldn't be able to tell the difference from a piece of ash from a piece of pine if they were holding a plank of each at the same time. Cover any (ANY) wood with layers of poly and/or nitro and the evidence is gone. You wouldn't have a clue what the instrument was made from. I'll cite evidence from the SE Bass Bash a couple of years ago that 30 bassists couldn't tell the difference between 20-odd different basses in a blind shootout; some of these guys couldn't recognise their own bass, let alone a Jazz from a Precision AND it was deemed that one of the best sounding (*all tone is subjective) was off a scratch build bass from one of the attendees. We really just need to take our heads out of our bottoms and stop being suckered in with this tonewood nonsense; as demonstrated by many builders posting stuff up on You Tube, you can built guitars out of pretty much anything and get wonderful results, the only caveat being that the thing will hold together under string tension.

I didn't put these on the Spector...they just sat in my cable box until about a month ago. Stuck them on my newly acquired Hamer and have to report they're bloody lovely. They feel a bit coarser than Elixirs, tonally a bit fuller. Nice tension. I shall be using elsewhere.

I did one gig where I went FoH. Confusion, headliner arrived, asked, 'Where's your amp?' Bassist replied he used IEMs and straight into the PA, so the sound guy took a feed from a Sansamp. We had no monitors, I couldn't hear anything, but the people out front heard everything and said it was fine. I just feel we all seem to be so worried about stuff that we really shouldn't be worrying about. How big the nut is. What the neck radius is. Neck-bloody-dive. How we really need to take out those Seymour Duncan Quarter Pounders and install some EMG active pickups etc. We're the only people in the band or room that's really concerned. Nobody there is interested in what gauge strings you have or whether you have an Aguilar tone circuit installed. Sigh.

Bit of an odd come back. Look, I gigged for years with a variety of amps (generally heads, rarely combos) but only one at a time. While I may have been fortunate, I never suffered amp loss either through breakdown or theft. Considering reliability, I'm an advocate of you get what you pay for, buy carp, expect carp. The OP didn't allude to what loss actually referred to. Home insurance is never going to weigh in where breakdowns are concerned and the likelihood of Hastings et al paying out quickly (ie in a week) to cover loss by theft and replacement thereof is unlikely. Thing is, a lot of small venues adopt gear sharing, so in that instance it's reasonable that another band will let you use their kit. A lot of small venues also have backline available as well (although it might not be fit for purpose). If you're in a wedding band (or something where you're the only band playing), you could feasibly go through FoH and hey let's face it, we live in networked times, there will always be someone who can loan you an amp until you're sorted. To be honest, it's nothing I'd be getting my panties in a twist about. If the OP is concerned, a secondhand TC Electronic BH550 will suffice. Tone print, loudish. It's just whether the desire for a backup outweighs the desire to spend £400 on some small/portable. Personally, after years of doing this, I wouldn't worry. There's always a solution.

I think this sums things up succinctly enough.

Rich, health issues aside, have you never had a moment where you just make a decision in an instant? I recall being in WH Smith in Reading a few years back, I picked up a copy of the US Bass Player magazine and saw an article about Pearl Jam's Jeff Ament. He was pictured with his Lull Signature model. At that point I was up to about nine or ten Thunderbirds and it was like someone just threw a switch, I knew instantly that my foray into Gibson basses was pretty much over there and then. In an instant it was like, 'I really need to sell my Gibsons and get one of those.' Thing is, nothing is forever. I've had to sell stuff to cover building work, years ago a really nice Warwick that I'd desired for a really long time facilitated part of my kitchen...now that hurt a lot at the time, but I know now that ultimately I would never have kept that bass, otherwise I'd have tried to buy it back. Onwards and upwards. Never go back. I do understand the importance of possession on the human psyche; if you did needed the swag, I'd happily let you pawn the Wal to me and I'd just store it unplayed until you could settle the funds back.